Why Didn't Siege Weapons Work?

Ok, while the Lich King plot and new Death Knight class really got me interested in buying WotLK when they first announced it, the idea of siege warfare is what got me excited for sure.

Ok, granted, siege warfare might not have turned out the way everyone thought it was; demolishers destroying towns and villages as shown in the video wasn't implemented, and the aerial dogfight they advertised didn't happen either, so essentially the only siege warfare was against castle gates and the walls of Wintergrasp, but at least we got to actually destroying some things, even if they were walls and gates. Hey, Cata even gave us some towers in Top Barad to bring down (yes, even if they're just towers).

So why is everyone so unhappy with siege weapons? I can't ever play a single Isle of Conquest or Strand of the Ancients map without people complaining about how stupid singing is, and the only people who show up to play at Wintergrasp are the people I bring from my guild or invite over trade chat.

They were also pretty buggy when first introduced, and they maneuvered way slower than players were used to. There also weren't secondary objectives with siege engines, you moved them to position and destroyed the target at that location; with how slow they moved you had to be pretty sure you'd need to be where you were going in 5 minutes.

Essentially, they were very different from how players normally interacted with their environment and not in any good way.

They're just not very fun. You don't get an opportunity to learn how to use them so any quest that involves vehicles has to be incredibly easy otherwise people would be extremely frustrated having to learn a vehicle for one quest. So in pretty much all vehicle quests there is absolutely no threat of failure and the mechanics are so simple it's just dull.

cause they dont belong in pvp situations, sure its fun in quest once in a while, but if you're forced to jump into tank and autorun 5 min to gate in pvp situation its simply boring... might aswell go afk ^^

Spamming 1 button untill a gate blows up just isn't fun. WG was the most fun because you had objectives around the map and you could attack from different sides. Strands only has 2 points to attack which makes it very predictable. It's also pretty boring to smack around a vehicle that does literally nothing back. The only difference between most IoCs and hitting a target dummy is that the siege moves and target dummies don't. Picking up bombs, /dance until they blow and then run back to pick up another bomb is pretty lame aswell.

I think the problem (besides 1 button spam to blow door) is that they dont explore the strategy behind this... since there are usually hundreds of random people in the "warfare" it ends up being just get in and roll your head on the keyboard... I think Guild Wars has achieved something a lot cooler with their system... basically players are responsible for "buying" siege weapons and then they can use it to take strategic check points in a world battle... I dont know, nowadays wow pvp has so many flaws I dont even think there is something they could to...

Because instead of making it a fun thing, they made them a pain in the ass because they were slow as hell.

Instead from that, we got some awesome quests like the first horde quest in Pandaria with the machine gun, or the yeti quest in Kun-Lai, the similar "Ride something" quests are fun.

But the Siege weapons in the game were simply slow as hell because they couldnt make it work as they hoped so, so instead they chose different approaches.

all quests that give you a new action bar are stupid. They have all been made retard proof with either a bunch of 1shot aoe buttons so it doesn't matter what you press, everything just dies OR you get 1 button to spam/channel and mouse over things and they die instantly.

My best guess is that it's because it doesn't incorporate your character at all. Yeah, there's some scaling, but you don't use class abilities or anything.

That said, I agree. The vehicle system might be my favorite addition to the game from Wrath of the Lich King. Because using siege weapons and manning turrets is awesome, and how could that incorporate most class abilities anyway?

Also, Strand of the Ancients is probably my favorite battleground. But what really shocks me about how unpopular it is isn't the vehicles. I don't like Strand of the Ancient because of the vehicles, I like it because win or lose, steamroll or stalemate, it's consistently the shortest battleground. That means if the match is bad, it's gonna be over soon. Contrary to my most hated battlegrounds, the capture the flag maps, which, despite the addition of a time limit, very, very often reach that time limit, usually in the most boring way possible.

Because people bitched and derped to high heaven that they "leveled to make their players more powerful, not to steer a vehicle around". From WG to the first Ulduar boss to jousting, you basically heard the same complaints.

Logical evolution for this game in both PvE AND world PvP would be for an increase in usage of vehicles. I wrote up a pretty detailed outline of this many months ago, but the focus of it was that guilds would be able to assemble siege weapons and vehicles to use in varying ways. Large air transports, river going warships, etc etc. You could have some siege vehicles that would need to be pulled by teams of 3 or 4 players on ground mounts. They could require maintenance or repair, sometimes on the fly, by various professions (as well as be another gold sink if needed) It'd make guild association quite valuable for players of all types, add a ton of end game content that wasn't raid-centric, boost professions, etc etc.

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Plox. I got your plox right fucking here. - Animalhouse
I still prefer seeing Thrall rather than blood in my urine, that doesnt make him a good character. - Verdugo

The only siege weapon, that feels like an actual siege weapon is probably the siege engine from IoC or the one from TB, with it's siege mode.

Rest of them feels like you are actually gimping yourself. They're weak, both survivability-wise and damage-wise. The fact that they can be affected with player debuffs, like slow is also kind of stupid. Sure, it's a game mechanic, but still - the idea of causing a demolisher concussion, or poisoning it, hence causing it to drive slower... Come on.

This was actually in Wintergrasp during the WotLK beta, and let me tell you something straight-- it didn't work.

Sure, you could fly around and shoot missiles (straight ahead), but the only thing you could actually hit was the broad side of the barn (or in WG's case, the gate). Nobody could shoot you down, nobody could stop you or anything, but the problem also was you couldn't hit anybody, either.

If you love to level up alts to feel the different class mechanics, you'll be extremely annoyed by the vehicle quests that remove all the uniqueness and give you the same buttons to push regardless of which alt you're on.

Originally Posted by ohshift

Probably because players are so damn stupid that they can't learn the 3 skills in the vehicles (take a look at Oculus and Flame Leviathan), thus, they whine in the internerds.

The problem with Oculus was that early on (before the gear scaling and the nerfs) it was a really tight fight where one guy who didn't know how to play the drake could easily wipe the group. The stuff you fought on the way to the last boss didn't really prepare you for the fight at all so you could only learn by experimenting ie wiping on the last boss and if you're nearly certain that bringing a new guy along means you'll spend a good while wiping while they figure out the drakes, then you don't really want to bring in any new guys.

The Oculus was one of those dungeons where you first reached the end boss, wiped miserably for a good while and then when it all finally clicked and the boss went down, you felt so good. And then you realized that you don't want to come to the place ever again with people who haven't done the fight before because going through someone else's learning wipes just isn't fun. It's very bad design to create fights where finishing the dungeon depends on skills that you can only practice in the dungeon itself as people who have already spent their time wiping in the dungeon will be very frustrated by having to do it all again just to teach someone else.

This problem exists with the siege vehicles somewhat, eg. in Wintergrasp you'd get frustrated by all the people who filled your vehicle limit with catapults when they could have built the ones that could actually take down walls or the even more hilarious people just chasing people with a siege engine. Someone was always raging at this but the only way to realize what the vehicles are good for is to experiment with the different vehicles but you can only experiment and try stuff in Wintergrasp when the battle is on.